Goodbye south island, hello north island! We took our camper on the 3.5 hour ferry ride from Picton over to New Zealand's capital city, Wellington. After some bad reversing skills onto the ferry by me and a good laugh all round from the irks an the crew, we hit the deck to enjoy the view and sunshine before heading down to the lounge for a chill. Wellington is a much bigger city than anything we have experienced yet in New Zealand and that took us by surprise. A...

We have had a quiet, uneventful few days as we travelled from Franz Josef to Nelson and then onto Picton to take the ferry over to the North Island. We stopped off at an interesting little coastal walk in a town called Punakaiki. The walk had interesting rocks protruding from the sea that looked like stacks of pancakes and gave them their name, the pancake rocks. It was a very pretty walk and at high tide the sea crashes up through blowholes and is by all accoun...

As we had missed the ice back home in England this year, we decided to have a day amongst it just to remind us what we had missed out on. We now remember and after one day had had enough of it! We drove over into glacier country from Wanaka, passing through more mountains and the Fox glacier, before arriving at the town of the Franz Josef glacier. This new van really struggles with the slopes but it is getting us there, just in our own time. We spent our first ...

We are now in the very beautiful lake Wanaka, enjoying the sunshine and scenery. We drove here from Queenstown via the scenic route of Crown range which was a large expanse of mountains where we could marvel at the views in the valleys in between. Wanaka itself is smaller than Queenstown but has a similar feel to it, set around a lake with numerous bars and restaurants lining the streets to relax and take in the view. We chose a campsite just out of town with go...

The sun has finally come out to warm us up! We awoke on Tuesday morning to find our bedrooms toasty hot and had our breakfast sat in the sun by the lake! We drove over to the airport to take the van into the Jucy office, as advised, to get the faults fixed. While we were waiting we took a look around the show vehicles and jealously looked at the larger condo version with all the space and facilities! Out of interest, Sally asked how much more it would cost and a...